What is it about?
Climate models have systematic errors. For instance, North Atlantic storms tend to make landfall in Europe rather than turning up into the Norwegian Sea. We corrected large scale errors in a climate model and then downscaled it onto a finer mesh. This gave us a more realistic storm track and a better geographical distribution of precipitation in Norway.
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Why is it important?
Flooding is a big problem in southern Norway, and this is expected to become worse with climate change. Up to now, precipitation has been misrepresented because of the errors in the climate models, making adaptation difficult. Our new method has the potential to improve climate projections on the local scale, providing better data to decision makers on the regional level.
Perspectives
I've been thinking about this problem for a long time, and it felt good to finally test the hypothesis can the errors in the models can be rectified. The results weren't quite as good as I had hoped, but now we've started work along a path that will hopefully lead to more accurate climate projections. I've seen how important this is after working with local municipalities for several years.
Dr Erik W Kolstad
NORCE Norwegian Research Centre
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Improving the reliability and added value of dynamical downscaling via correction of large-scale errors: A Norwegian perspective, Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres, October 2018, American Geophysical Union (AGU),
DOI: 10.1029/2018jd028372.
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